Research means hitting wrong notes

May 08, 2015

This is a castle, isn't it? There are tapestries.

Predictably, once I started eyeing a tapestry loom (and having eyed a few tapestries at the Sheep and Wool festival), I started wondering about making them. The most famous Anglo-Saxon "tapestry" isn't actually a tapestry - that'd be the Bayeux Tapestry. It's wool embroidery on linen.

But there's also the Oseberg tapestry, c. 834 CE. This article quotes some sources. Seems that the figures were worked in wool on a linen ground. Outlines were made by wrapping weft around the warps - soumak, I think. But then it goes on to call the infill "brocade" instead of "tapestry." As I understand it, brocade wefts float on top of the underlying weaving. Tapestry wefts are interlaced with the warps, like normal weaving - but the result is weft-faced, so you don't see the warps.

Given how large some of the fill areas are, I'm going to guess that it *isn't* brocading. If you were really laying down threads that long, you'd probably want to do something like the Bayeux laid-and-couching, where you secure those long, long floats with other threads.

Wall coverings are definitely mentioned in Anglo-Saxon wills, along with bench cushions and other household textiles. I don't know what the OE word is, or if we know with any certainty if it refers to designs -embroidered on- fabric, or designs -woven in-.